As a parent of a newborn or soon-to-be parent, you must have concerns about their sleep routines and the number of sleepless nights that will be coming your way. All parents want their infants to sleep well and adapt to an ideal sleep routine. How much should your baby sleep? How does their sleep schedule change over time? How can we implement healthy sleep in the middle of these less-structured schedules?
We speak to Louise Duncan from Petite Dreamers, where they specialise in sleep routines for babies. Louise is a certified sleep consultant and a mother of two. She has helped many parents who have struggled with their child’s sleeping and has come up with step-by-step customised plans to help them through these challenges.
You can listen to the podcast here.
What do I need to know about my newborn’s need for sleep?
When your baby is born, it is a brand new experience. For nine months they have been growing in the 'baby's cave', inside its mother's tummy with no light and muffled sounds through all the amniotic fluid, etc.
It is important to understand that:
You need to shake off the expectation around their sleep routine. Oftentimes, before the child is born, we do lots of research and there's so much conflicting information out there that can make it really hard to know if what you are reading is right.
What does a good sleep routine entail?
Having a good sleep routine is really important, not just for newborns, but for all of us, When we're learning how to sleep, the best approach is putting in a bedtime or a nap time routine in place. It is effectively like your baby being aware of the time and they are prepared for what’s coming next when the sequence is kept the same every single night. It helps them fall asleep better.
There are 5 key elements to a baby's sleep routine:
What are the struggles we should be aware of?
How do sleep patterns change with time?
Sleep patterns do change. Every parent out there is very familiar with the term ‘The 4-month sleep regression’. Although it is a change in your child's sleep, it isn’t actually a regression, a regression would indicate that it's going to change and then change back. When in actual fact what happens at that time around the full month mark, your baby's sleep changes for effectively being what I affectionately call baby sleep, which is the sleep patterns in which they're born with, into what is a fully formed sleep cycle. Within that sleep cycle, there are a lot of lighter phases of sleep. Children who may have historically for the first couple of months been good sleepers, all of a sudden have erratic sleep where it regresses and changes. They become more susceptible to waking up and they feed more frequently. So, sleep does change in that regard but once they've gone through that stage of reorganisation of sleep, your baby’s sleep has the same makeup of sleep that you do as an adult.
How do we create a good sleep environment?
Could you share more about Petite Dreamers and what you do?
I am the founder of Petite Dreamers and I started my company about five and a half years ago, nearly six. It all came about when my own daughter who was eight months at the time didn't sleep well. She would sleep probably about 30 minutes a day and then be up most of the night, she was really sleep deprived. Also, I had pretty bad postnatal depression. I then reached out to another sleep consultant who used to be in Singapore and she helped me teach
Everyone just wants to know they're doing the right thing and that they're doing it well. When things are a little bit frightening and you're doing something that you're not quite sure of, that's where I'm there to basically hold your head to get you through it.